In case you haven’t heard about this yet, Washington, DC district officials will not appeal a court order blocking enforcement of the city’s restrictions on carrying concealed guns in public. We wrote about this in September, when Second Amendment advocates argued their case in front of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit to try to overturn laws restricting who is eligible for a concealed carry permit.
Now that we know there will be no appeal of the ruling blocking the restrictions, it’s likely that many people in Washington, DC will now apply for their permits and will likely get them.
Previously, the city required that people seeking licenses to carry concealed weapons demonstrate a “good reason” — such as a credible fear of violence — for carrying a gun in public. Announcing his decision, D.C. Attorney General Karl A. Racine (D) said he continued to believe the city’s law was sensible and constitutional. But he said an unfavorable ruling on the law from the Supreme Court would put similar concealed-carry restrictions across the country in jeopardy.
“We must reckon with the fact that an adverse decision by the Supreme Court could have wide-ranging negative effects not just on District residents, but on the country as a whole,” Racine said in a statement.
